Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Hi, my name is Peter, and this is Tonight the Streets Are Ours. (What do you think? I needed a URL, and it turned out basically everything else was taken. Plus I’m really into that song, and I figured, hey, if it works for Richard Hawley, it’ll work for me, too. Tonight the streets are mine, you know.)

If you’re here, then congratulations! You have found my … um … website, I guess. (“Journal” doesn’t sound right because those are supposed to be private and this is only as private as the Internet can be, which is to say: not private at all. And I hate the word “blog.” For some reason it sounds like somebody’s aunt attempting to sound “hip” and “with-it” by using the modern Internet slang so favored among “kids these days.” So, “website” it is.)

I want to be a writer when I grow up. Actually, I want to be a writer right now, and also when I grow up. Today is my seventeenth birthday, so I have made a new year’s resolution. (Yeah, it’s not the new year for everybody, but it’s a new year for ME, so, good enough.) I’m going to post here every day, and that will be good writing practice, and also when it’s time for me to write my memoirs, I will already have these collected notes on my teen years. You’re welcome, Future Peter.

My dad says that I don’t want to pursue a career as a writer because writers are—what did he say? Something like “congenitally miserable alcoholics.” If he’s right, then I guess I’ll fit right in! Haha, kidding.

Also, my dad is a congenitally miserable alcoholic, too, and he doesn’t even produce any writing or whatever to show for it. You can be a congenitally miserable alcoholic even if all you do is manage hedge funds, apparently. Seems like a waste. If you’re going to have the tortured soul of an artist, then you might as well create some art while you’re at it.

Arden smiled a little at Peter’s description of his father. It was nice to know that her mother wasn’t the only screwed-up parent around. And now that she knew Peter was just a year older than she was, she felt even more intrigued by him and his miserable dad and the girl who broke his heart and the mysteriously disappeared brother.

She wanted to read whatever came next, but more than that, she wanted to know where Peter’s brother went. So she skipped forward a few months. At last she found an explanation, in a post dated just a couple weeks before Bianca and Peter’s breakup.



September 24

I know I haven’t written here for a while, and I’m sorry.

I’m sorry for a lot of things, in fact.

I don’t really know where to start. That’s the problem with updating a website every day: once you miss a week, you’ll be behind forever.

So, basically, my brother ran away. He’s been gone for a week now, and he’s left no trace. He’d only been at college for a month, and from all we heard from him, he seemed to be fitting in well, making friends, going to classes, learning stuff, I don’t know, whatever it is people do at college.

And then he took off.

None of his new college friends know where he went. None of his old high school friends have heard from him. The cops say they can’t be much help because he’s eighteen, he’s a legal adult, he can go where he wants. There’s no sign of him; it’s as if he never existed in the first place.

My dad is hiring a private investigator. He’s livid. He says, “I will spend every penny, if that’s what it takes to find that boy.” My mom keeps crying. It’s like they know it’s their fault. If they weren’t like this, maybe he wouldn’t have left.

Everyone’s asked me if he told me anything, if I have any ideas. Because we’re just a year apart, we’re supposed to be so close. We’re supposed to share things. From the time we were little kids, we shared toys, we shared clothes, we shared friends. But I’m as clueless as everyone else right now—how do you think that makes me feel?

I stayed home from school almost all last week. My parents stayed home from work. It’s as if he died. For all I know, maybe he is dead.